Pessimism over Iraq. I'm sure I'm the
last person on earth to write about this, but maybe not, so what
the hell. A bunch of US generals are re-casting their opinions
about what we're facing in Iraq, and their forecast isn't pretty. If I understand the
Internet, I suspect that most of you (here) won't be surprised by
the downturn in the perspective, but are more likely to ask why
dawn has been so slow to break on Marblehead. You probably also
haven't been surprised by the continual downward
spiral in Bush's approval ratings (disclosure: I work at
SRBI, but not in the polling group), nor by the Downing Street memo
story...

The problem for us all, I guess, is how we cope with the
preposterousness of the Preznit claiming he had his
accountability moment, and secondly, how we deal with our fellow
citizens who not only participated in re-electing his Putzness,
but also (lets face it) implicitly condoned everything he did
before and since.

There was a book which came out about five years ago dealing
with German culture in the 1930's and 1940's, called something
like "Hitler's Willing Accomplices," and it was an indictment of
the German people's willingness to comply. So far as you know,
has anyone delimned the difference here? What with the
falsification of intelligence, is this different from invading
Poland and acting like Poland was being aggressive?

More adventures in cooking. If you've
been here a while, you know about my off the beaten path
adventures such as poffertjes and squid... Well, in keeping with my
openness about such efforts, I should tell you that tonight we
did grilled octopus. It turned out exactly as it should have,
although my daughter and I were far more accepting of the texture
than my wife was. It's really
not difficult, and the key thing to remember is that in all
likelihood the octopus you buy has already been cleaned. You can't say that for
squid.

It's not a show stopper for your dinner party, but you'll
certainly get high marks for doing something besides chicken.
(But you may want to do a little exploratory research with your
dinner guests in advance.)
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9:58 PM | Home

"...people that would be in a better
position..." Oh, by now you know the story is unfolding with
respect to Newsweek and the claims that a copy of the Koran was
flushed down a toilet to provoke a Guantanamo detainee to talk.
And doubtless you know that although General Richard B. Myers
testified that his best sources in Afghanistan had concluded that
riots there, as well as subsequent deaths, had not been
caused by Newsweek's now-retracted story, that WH spokesliar
Scott McClellan had disregarded Myers' testimony and cried out
that people had died due to the Newsweek article.

That summary having been done, did you catch this part of
Scotty's briefing today?

Q Has there been any reduction in the incitement of violence,
based upon the retraction, that the White House has been able to
detect?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know that I'm in a position to assess
the latest situation on the ground in Afghanistan or Pakistan. I
mean, there are other people that would be in a better position
to do that.

So, since you may not be reading this with your better
glasses, let's connect the dots: remember that crystal ball which
enabled the Wicked Witch of the West to see distant events? All
of a sudden Scotty's has gone on the blink. It was working
just fine when the news was bad — in fact, Scotty's
worked even better than General Myers' model — but now that
Scotty was asked if all the violence had abated, he has to KICK
KICK it (damn, still too much snow, definitely need a new pair of
rabbit ears).

Now let's remember, Scotty hails from Texas, which is also
where Tandy/Radio Shack hails from. Seems to me we could save a
whole lot on shipping...
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8:58 PM | Home

Thomas Friedman disregards General
Richard B. Myers. Myers, of course, is only the U.S.'s top
military officer. Human, of course, with the potential to be
wrong. In today's column, Friedman
wrote...

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run
side by side during the past week. One is the story about the
violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in
Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S.
interrogators at Guant namo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it
into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were
killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that
has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek
story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S.
interrogators behaved that way.

General Myers ... told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday that
the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Carl Eichenberry,
disagrees with the reports that protests in the city of Jalalabad
were caused by anger over the alleged Koran incident.

"It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General
Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad
was not necessarily the result of the allegations about
disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political
process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and
his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not
at all tied to the article in the magazine," he explained.

I think that people who are trying to point to Newsweek are
relying merely on the contiguity of events, and assuming
causality. You can't even claim it's a catalyst: at best, it was
merely the gripe closest at hand. (A point made first in this
blog by
Doug.)
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7:27 AM | Home

Editor's Note: On Monday afternoon, May 16, Whitaker issued the
following statement: Based on what we know now, we are retracting
our original story that an internal military investigation had
uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

90% or more of my last post stands, however. The US hasn't
been exonerated over the use of the Koran in interrogations, as
prior claims of this sort of thing had
occurred, so Newsweek was correct in viewing the recent charge
within the context of what had already been claimed. (Whether or
not those prior claims have been fully investigated, I don't
know.)

Regarding my other points, the White House was clearly asking
for more exoneration than it deserved based on yesterday
morning's information, it's done so in the past, and we have a
horrible record in this war. We're not exonerated. (More on the
full extent of the allegations
here.)
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7:08 AM | Home

NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing
the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK
PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this
accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the
story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to
Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation,
might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the
official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But
he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not
meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom
report.

Obviously this is far from a retraction, and I was
wrong to characterize it as such yesterday.

The vehemence of the reaction to what Newsweek has "failed" to
do is surprising, however. Perhaps Scott McClellan didn't have
the benefit (yeah, right) of the full Newsweek article by the
time of this morning's gaggle...

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I find it puzzling that Newsweek now
acknowledges that the facts were wrong, and they refuse to offer
a retraction. There is a certain journalistic standard that
should be met, and in this case it was not met. The report was
not accurate, and it was based on a single anonymous source who
cannot personally substantiate the report, so the -- so they
cannot verify the accuracy of the report.

Q Scott, is the White House demanding a retraction --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying --

Q -- or are you satisfied with the statement Newsweek has made
--

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying that I find it puzzling
that the reporter got it wrong, yet said they're not retracting
the story.

Q -- a retraction, or --

MR. McCLELLAN: Actually, if you look at the comments from the
editor in this morning's papers he said, we're not retracting the
story, we don't know the facts. I don't think that's a standard
that we're talking about here.

Q So, Scott, you find it puzzling, but you're not asking for a
retraction?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's correct.

Q Why would you not ask --

MR. McCLELLAN: I mean, it's -- this report has had serious
consequences. It has caused damage to the image of the United
States abroad. It has -- people have lost their lives. It has
certainly caused damage to the credibility of the media, as well,
and Newsweek, itself.

Q Can you 100 percent say for sure that it is wrong, that
there were no incidents of American interrogators putting Korans
in the toilets?

MR. McCLELLAN: I know of no such incidents. And the Department
of Defense said last week that they could find no credible
evidence of it either. They have looked into it. And obviously,
we would take something like that very, seriously, because we've
made it clear that that is simply not -- that does not represent
the values of the United States of America. The United States of
America values the religious freedom of all. And, in fact, at
Guantanamo, we have made sure that the detainees are able to
worship freely, and that they are provided copies of the holy
Koran.

Q Has the President expressed his personal views on this?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm going to stop in a minute, the President is
starting to speak. I think I'm expressing our views.

McClellan's position, of course, is to maximize the nature of
Newsweek's error, make it seem as if the small error is
everything, and that the entire story should be thrown out. But
as today's Newsweek article states
on page two,

NEWSWEEK was not the first to report allegations of desecrating
the Qur'an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports
from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian
news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by
other released detainees have been covered in other media since
then.

So McClellan wants all this disregarded because of one small
fact which Newsweek says it got wrong. (Note also, that when
McClellan was asked point blank about whether or not a copy of
the Koran was flushed, the best he could do was say that there's
been no evidence; that's a little better than the "non-denial
denial" one frequently hears on these occasions, but "100 percent
sure" isn't something you can ever say about something not
happening. And as for McClellan's claim that "people have lost
their lives," well, the Defense Department has said that's
not true.)

Have we learned nothing since "Rathergate"? The right sought
to throw away all allegations that Bush had failed to fulfill his
National Guard duties by pointing to one questionable story on
CBS. To some extent, that's what is going on now and in the
blogosphere. (The Poor Man's retort is well worth a
read, by the way.)

In an atmosphere where we have...

Threats to Europe over Belgium's insistence that it can try
US war criminals;

Abu Ghraib;

The US seeking to skirt the Geneva Conventions, and Alberto
Gonzales' torture memos;

All those memos and reports which the ACLU turned up on our
interrogation techniques;

And of course, now the Downing Street Memo...

...the Right is supposed to feel as if the US has been
exonerated?
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8:44 PM | Home

We cannot shirk our moral
obligations. We must look evil in the eye when it approaches
us, and be firm. We cannot look away in its presence. If need be,
we must summon our courage in order to do what is right. The
world, after all, depends on us as a great nation to do what is
right.

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy.

This memo, of course, is a serious piece of evidence. Can a
nation make any more important decision than whether to war?

The minutes are dated July 23, 2002. Less than three months
later, Bush would give his speech in Cincinnati, one outlining the threat which
it's apparent he wanted us to believe was there
(prophetically, the White House page with that speech is headed with a
graphic that reads "Iraq: Denial and Deception"). This was the
speech warning of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds. A
few months after the Cincinnati speech came the State of the Union address, warning of chemical
weapons, attempts to buy refined uranium, and so on. Condoleezza
Rice, of course, had appeared on Wolf Blitzer's show months
beforehand, touting aluminum tubes as being certainly for
enriching uranium, when she knew that the most
authoritative sources in the U.S. government had
concluded that they couldn't conceivably be used for that
purpose.

In March of 2003, Vice President Cheney appeared on NBC's
"Meet The Press" and stated that Iraq had reconstituted its
nuclear weapons; he would later claim that he had merely
misspoken, that he had meant to say reconstituted its
nuclear programs, yet he didn't clarify that until six
months had passed, long after the war had started: even though
his March statement was in the Washington Post at the time.

It could not be plainer but that evil has taken over the White
House. We cannot look away from this — the evidence has
become so massive that if we lapse into denial that we are
complicit in its continuation.

It is time for us to all to work together to at least minimize
the threat of this evil, if we cannot eradicate it from power
completely. Certainly, we must work towards this through peaceful
means, but just as certainly, if a President can be impeached
over consensual sexual relations, a President can be impeached
for lying to the public in the way that George W. Bush did to us.
The more so if Republicans continue to insist that Clinton
was impeached for lying.

You can find your Senators and Representatives through this link for Senators and this link for Representatives.
You must contact them now, and make them our allies in seeking
the truth. You must also contact your local newspaper and
television stations, as well as the major networks, and insist on
their diligence in covering this story.

We must work together on this; as Samuel Johnson wrote long
ago, "No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous." We
can be great again, but we must first insist on virtue.
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9:46 PM | Home

Newsweek is retracting a charge in one of
its stories.
Last week Newsweek reported that a copy of the Koran had been
flushed down a toilet in an effort to taunt a detainee at
Guantanamo (and I blogged about their report last Sunday). Today
they're retracting their story:

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report
that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo
Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests
sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend
our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S.
soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the
magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on
Monday.

Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S.
military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the
detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the
Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than
100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week
it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and
by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened
to call for a holy war against the United States.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the
information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who
told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay
said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a
toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could
not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in
the military report and that it might have been in other
investigative documents or drafts.

Normally, I don't copy this much from a news report, but this
retraction is important enough, seeing as how very few people
really click through links to read a story. (And there's more at
the link by the way.) For what it's worth, I've also added a
notice at my original post.
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4:54 PM | Home

Is Wexler's proposition even
necessary? The projected shortfall for Social Security is
subject to so many assumptions, assumptions about productivity
rates, economic growth, immigration, life spans, future incomes,
and so on, that it's a miracle if they get anything right.
Furthermore, the projections are highly sensitive to slight
variations in the inputs. The "shortfalls" we hear about are
based on the middle of three projections. But guess what
projection has been accurate more often than the others? It's the optimistic one, under which we won't see
shortfalls. (That link takes you to a post by Kevin Drum, and
there's a link in it which is probably behind the New York Times
archive gates; if so, try this
one.)
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12:53 PM | Home

Boldly touching the third rail. It's
not an easy thing for a politician to break from the crowd, and
do the unthinkable — that is, boldly touch that third rail
of American politics, Social Security. But a Democrat has done
so, and surprisingly, Donald Luskin isn't happy. Apparently, all
that talk which Luskin was doing about Social Security's finances
was insincere. Hmmm.
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11:29 AM | Home

The value of putting the Social Trust
Fund to government spending. This morning John Tierney morphs
from a complaint about pork in the new highway and transportation
bill to a complaint about
how the government utilizes funds it borrows from the Social
Security Trust Fund, leaving the trust fund with "IOUs."

The basic rhetorical technique is to say, here are two things
I object to, and I want to obscure their differences. The core
idea which drives his column is that when a trust fund is
created, it shouldn't be put to any other use than what was
originally envisioned. Regarding Social Security, Tierney's
suggests that when the government borrows money from the Social
Security Trust Fund, the money does nothing for Social
Security.

He couldn't be more wrong. Our budget funds pork, true, but
amidst that pork are initiatives which keep the country healthy
and ensure its long-term growth. National Defense, for instance.
Do we need to worry about Social Security's supposed insolvency
issue if the country isn't around? And how about education?
Education helps ensure that the populace is well-prepared to work
and find jobs; without jobs, people don't pay payroll taxes. And
healthcare? If people aren't healthy, they aren't at work. And
food stamps? Do hungry workers have their minds on being
productive? And aren't productivity assumptions an important
input to the Social Security Admin's actuarial projections?

I could go on and on on this point, but it's high time
conservatives recognized that government does good things,
many of which feed back to the health of Social Security.
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9:59 AM | Home

Q Scott, I wondered if I could return to the FDA's
decision last year to reject an advisory committee recommendation
to make the Plan B emergency contraceptive more widely available.
There are reports this week that an evangelical doctor, David
Hager, wrote a memo to the FDA that played a role in that
decision. And he has said that he was told by the White House --
asked by the White House to serve on the FDA an FDA panel on
reproductive drugs. He says he was called by the White House and
the White House said that, we feel there are some issues coming
up that are very critical and we want you to serve on this panel.
I'm wondering, did the White House play any role in him getting
onto this -- getting this appointment, and if so, why?

MR. McCLELLAN: I saw that report. A couple of things. First
of all, that decision is a matter for the FDA. And in terms of
the advisory panel that you're referring to, those are
appointments made by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The Secretary is one who appoints people to that advisory panel.
And in terms of the reports, I did an initial look into it, and I
know no one in personnel, from my understanding, had talked to
him about it. And I'll continue to look into it, see if there's
any additional information.

Q So as far as you know, he's wrong and was not contacted
by anyone at the White House?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I just said that I was able to do an
initial check with some of our personnel team, and they had not
spoken to him. But this is an appointment by the Secretary of
Health and Human Services.

(You may want some background from this discussion at snopes.com
, where they write "true" about the claim "President Bush has
appointed W. David Hager, a physician and anti-abortion activist,
to an FDA committee on reproductive drugs.")

"That decision is a matter for the FDA." From this page at the FDA you can learn that Hager's term
began in December 27, 2002. Who was the head of the FDA at the
time? Why, none other than Scott's brother Mark, who was in charge of the FDA from November
2002 to March 25, 2004. And what was Dr. McClellan's prior
position, just before the FDA? That bio page will tell you that "[d]uring 2001 and 2002, Dr.
McClellan served in the White House as a Member of the
President's Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on
domestic economic issues and was a senior policy director for
health care and related economic issues."

So Scott could have rephrased "that decision is a
matter for the FDA" as, "yeah, my brother made that decision,
just after the White House put him in charge of the FDA; yup, we
got our mole in, and then all hell broke loose. Sometimes your
family just turns on you or something. I dunno."
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9:20 AM | Home

Bill Frist is completely lacking in
perspective. It looks as if Frist is set to
force a showdown over federal judicial nominees and the use
of the filibuster, to the point of being willing to deploy what
Republican Senator Trent Lott referred to as "the nuclear
option," removing the filibuster from the equation. There are
lots of reasons to be concerned here; the shape of the judiciary
is one concern (although it's appropriate to point out that the
federal judge who was harshest about federal intervention from
the executive and judiciary branches regarding Terri Schiavo was
nominated by a Republican President), but it doesn't stop
there.

In fact, I'm not sure people have even thought long enough
about its impact on the judiciary alone; certainly the GOP would
have screamed about Trott's "nuclear option" had the Democrats
deployed it during the Clinton years, when Clinton nominee after
Clinton nominee never came to the Senate floor. There is also the
sad possibility that were Trent Lott's nuclear option deployed,
it would happen again when Democrats return to power (they will:
Republicans need to recognize that), and then what? Do we see
another round of polarizing judicial nominees from the Democrats,
in an effort to play "catch up"? And each time the pendulum
swings, will it get worse and worse, leaving fewer and fewer
moderate judges? At such a point, imagine what the courts will be
like: how many decision will be appealed unnecessarily, out of an
attempt to get a hearing from judges who share your politics? How
inefficient will the judiciary then become? Will the Supreme
Court be called upon far more often? And will the SCOTUS find
itself accepting cases based on the political leanings of the
previous court?

Now, let's be serious about the concerns: can anyone be
assured that the power hungry GOP will be satisfied with limiting
the nuclear option to just judicial nominees? I'm not talking
about this year: let's just say for a moment that the nuclear
option goes through. 15 years from now, we could well still have
a GOP which continues to pander to its most conservative
elements, which will then be working in the context of nuclear as
acceptable for judges. (It will be part of their cognitive
framework by then.) Can we be confident that they won't want to
extend it to other areas? Not just nominees, but legislation? An
end to debate and an airing of the concerns of the senators and
the people?

And since pendulums do have a habit of swinging, how stable
will our government be at that point, with no protection for the
minority, and a constant back and forth?

Call me Chicken Little here, but I think that Bill Frist has
not imagined the future. We know he knows nothing of the
past — he continues to refer to the current actions of the
Democrats as
unprecedented obsructionism in a foul attempt to hide the
history of how the Senate behaved regarding Clinton's nominees.
And if Frist can't be bothered with looking back to the easily
verifiable past, who could trust him to contemplate the future,
or a shoe on the other foot?
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8:36 AM | Home

Daniel Okrent was better on Ken Burns'
"Baseball." If you've seen Ken Burns' "Baseball," you may
remember a recurring commenter with glasses who spoke eloquently
about the game (and I don't mean George Will). It was Daniel
Okrent, who we now know as the Lame Duck Public Editor of the New York
Times. The Times recently released a set of conclusions on how it
should move
forward, and I, for one, am glad Okrent won't be part of the
forward movement.

While I love his contribution to the Burns documentary, I
think that he made a huge strategic mistake by refusing to
fulfill his quality control role regarding Bush vs. Kerry
until the election was over. If you read the Times'
coverage, you were constantly treated to reporters avoiding the
truth, either by not commenting on the falsehoods or by offering
countering perspectives, legitimate or not. Thus, Ken Mehlman was
allowed to baldly say that Kerry had no plan — even though
any visitor to johnkerry.com could see that Kerry did, and
it was detailed. This sort of thing went on day after day,
letting political hacks have free access to the Times' readers,
without any added value from the Times. This isn't a whole lot
worse than what Jeff Gannon was doing by cut and pasting RNC
talking points into his pieces; the Times only gave a name to the
fax machine. Big damn difference. And Okrent didn't do a thing
until after the election. That was helpful. See that
approaching iceberg? Ah, I'll tell you later.
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9:48 PM | Home

Putting the blame where it certainly
doesn't belong. Eric Pfeiffer wrote thusly about yesterday's proceedings in the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee:

It took less than an hour for the SFRC to endanger the nomination
of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. After
missing the first two Bolton hearings and delaying a committee
vote on Bolton's nomination an additional month, Ohio Republican
George Voinovich Thursday ensured that Bolton would not leave the
committee with a positive recommendation.

Let's be clear: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee never
endangered Bolton's nomination. There are plenty of nominees who
would have sailed through hearings and received broad support.
But Bolton isn't one of them, and the blame for Bolton's
difficulty lies with Bolton and Bush, not the committee. And it's
just laughable to suggest otherwise.
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9:15 PM | Home

If the election were held today,
would Blair have retained a majority for Labor? Would Bush have
gotten his slim margin of victory? An article in this morning's
Washington Post has more on early warnings to Blair that Bush was
twisting the intelligence in order to
invade Iraq.

Clearly, the reason Bush refused to give the inspectors more
time had nothing to do with finding out the truth, but avoiding
the exposure of Bush's charade. And now, of course, 1615 US troops have died;
perhaps 100,000 innocent Iraqis; our military
is depleted, and the budget's a wreck.

How many on the right are soothing themselves by saying, "at
least Bush is against abortion"? What have they gotten in bed
with? Do they have any idea where this man will stop?
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7:13 AM | Home

Someone who really should know better
forwarded me an email about Hillary Clinton, hot outta their in-
box without giving it any serious scrutiny. The claim was that as
First Lady she was abusive to Secret Service personnel in front
of reporters, and the press was always too scared to report it.
As if the press gave the Clintons anything close to a free pass
— remember how willing they were to talk about Clinton
supposedly screwing up all the take-offs at LAX while he had his
hair done? And did you notice how much the press rallied around
the Clintons once it was clear that Whitewater amounted to
nothing?

Sadly, this came from the same person who I lambasted last
October for forwarding incredible lies about Kerry. At the time,
I was harsh about the failure to do the slightest checking before
participating in slander. They heard me (and I think I saw the
sputter and blush, even through denial), and have completely
forgotten that incident.

By the way, some have said that President Bush eats babies.
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10:36 PM | Home

An Agriculture Department agency paid a freelance writer at
least $7,500 to write articles touting federal conservation
programs and place them in outdoors magazines, according to
agency records and interviews.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service hired freelancer
Dave Smith in September 2003 to "research and write articles for
hunting and fishing magazines describing the benefits of NRCS
Farm Bill programs to wildlife habitat and the environment,"
according to agency procurement documents obtained by The
Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Smith, contracted to craft five stories for $1,875 each, also
was to "contact and work magazine editors to place the articles
in targeted publications," the records show.

The disclosure of the contract comes as the Bush
administration is under scrutiny for its controversial public
relations practices, including payments to journalists to promote
administration policies and government-produced "video news
releases" that resemble broadcast news stories.

What a pathetic administration — they're really making a
mockery of the idea of morality when they pull crap like this.
How Soviet!
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9:20 PM | Home

Was it worse than we feared?One of the controversial elements surrounding
the nomination of John Bolton to U.N. Ambassador surrounds a
fiery speech he gave over North Korea, a speech which displeased
a number of people in the State Department. Guess what? The speech was approved. To some
extent, then, it mitigates perceptions of Bolton as a loose
cannon. But at the same time, not only does it leave concerns
about his policy skills still questionable, it calls into
question those who approved the speech. I am not encouraged.
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9:07 PM | Home